Plastic predicament

been using liquid laundry detergent but, yet again, that comes in big plastic bottles. In the local pound shop I find some Persil powder in a cardboard box. Fabric conditioner is a nonstarter though – all I saw comes in plastic bottles or cartons.

Back home, the meat, bread and veg looks and smells so much better than the supermarket version and there is no plastic in sight.

Dinner is steak pies from the butcher with peas but after forgetting to buy a tin of peas we have to resort to frozen peas which, of course, come in a plastic bag. And after such a successful day…

DAY THREE

Time to hit the gym. I would normally buy a plastic bottle of water then bin it. I can’t see any option to be plastic-free so I get a reusable bottle. Even my thermal coffee mug in the car has a plastic lid, so I make do with a coffee before leaving. Breakfast should go well – we have the bottle of milk and some cereal from a cardboard box.

But hang on, the cereal inside is wrapped in plastic. Another fail. Normally, the girls go to school with chopped fruit in a plastic tub but instead they take apples and tangerines from the greengrocer’s. I make lunch using a chicken from the butcher and bread from the bakery, then dinner is chicken Kievs from the butcher and veg from the greengrocer.

The butcher’s meat was much more expensive: two Kievs cost £5.69 compared with £1.29 in Aldi. But they were much bigger and tasted homemade and delicious.

The kids aren’t happy at having their bottled Vimto replaced with tap water but at least their Jaffa Cakes and Jammy Dodgers come in cardboard boxes... but then I remember the plastic wrapping they had originally been in.

DAY FOUR

Breakfast is sausages from the butcher’s and toast made from leftover bread. With so much fresh food open to the air, it’s clear that to sustain the non-plastic life our shopping would have to be done several times a week rather than in one big supermarket shop.

The usual things I would buy from Aldi such as a chicken, meatballs and fish all come in plastic. And a supermarket delivery would be out of the question – everything seems to come in plastic containers and bags.

There’s no time to go shopping again, so tonight’s dinner is what the kids call their “favourite emergency tea” – fishfinger sandwiches and peas.

After nipping to the corner shop for a tin of peas, the using-frozen-peas crisis is averted for today.

The fishfingers come from a cardboard box and the bread was wrapped in paper.

VERDICT

It is shocking just how much plastic we use every day without even thinking about it.

This experiment has encouraged me to find plastic-free options but I must admit, it is so time-consuming.

Our entire lives rely on plastic, even down to many of us paying for our shopping with a debit card.

Using plastic is just about unavoidable, as modern life is not designed to be plastic-free. So it’s down to retailers to come up with more environmentally friendly forms of packaging.